All tickets for Mountains to Sea are now on sale!

All tickets for the dlr Book Festival Mountains to Sea 2019 festival are now available to buy including events on International Women’s Day – 8th March 2019. Amongst the many wonderful storytellers who will visit Dun Laoghaire in 2019 are Margaret Drabble, Michael Holroyd, Sally Rooney, Stephen Rea and Neil Martin, Jess Kidd, Kate Mosse, Tracey Thorn, John Kelly, John Boyne, Sorcha Pollak, Daniel Trilling, Bernard O’ Donoghue, Dervla Murphy, Grace Wells & Stephen James Smith. For full details and booking , please see here

The theme of the 2019 Festival is ‘Speaking with Strangers’. It has been an extraordinary year for anyone who is a ‘stranger’ -the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own. This too has been a remarkable year for literature – fiction, poetry and non-fiction - exploring the stories and experiences of strangers in that sense but also the notion of strangeness within the self, in our individual sense of being. The act of storytelling is in itself an act of profound generosity and in 2019 we are thrilled to welcome some truly gifted storytellers who will share with us their worlds of poetry , fiction and non fiction.

Other highlights include a special celebration of Constellations, a debut collection of essays by broadcaster and literary star Sinead Gleeson hosted by Maeve Higgins, in the company of singer songwriter Maria Doyle Kennedy. We’ll meet Colm O’ Regan, in his first outing as a novelist with Maia Dunphy. The essay features strongly with the Notes to Self author Emilie Pine in conversation with Brian Dillon whose In The Dark Room was re-issued earlier this year.

The 2019 children’s programme welcomes Sara Keating as Associate Writer. Schoolchildren will get the chance to meet the authors whose writing they’ve read and enjoyed, at our schools events on the 28th and 29th March. On Saturday 30th, we introduce, as part of our Festival Day Out, a day of events that are creative, family friendly and open to everyone. There will be quizzes, nature trails, readings, draw-alongs and a very special live performance of Roald Dahl’s wonderful Little Red Riding Hood.

We take a number of events to the dlr Mill Theatre in Dundrum where we open with a delicious discussion of food writing hosted by our writer in residence, Sarah Maria Griffin in the company of chef and food writer Lily Higgins and the Currabinny Cookbook duo James Kavanagh and William Murray 8th March – International Women’s Day) Rick O Shea hosts three wonderful novelists for a conversation about their latest gems, you will hear from John Boyne, Hannah Beckerman and Kate Mosse about three very different ‘must reads’ of 2019

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2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s demise. In 2019, we curiously find ourselves in a world where there’s a new found enthusiasm for building walls, where, as David Runciman has put it, we are witnessing democracy’s ‘mid- life crisis’ . In Present Tense, our non-fiction strand, as Brexit dawns, we take a moment to consider the repercussions of these new walls going up all around us. We consider a history of the present with Pakaj Mishra as he delves into the Age of Anger and traces our current state of play back to the 19th century.

Professor Diarmaid Ferriter joins film maker Nuala O’Connor and novelist Eoin McNamee discuss our very own border, its repercussions for those living on either side and its uncertain future in light of the political stalemate of the recent past. International journalist Lara Marlowe and novelist Ahdaf Soueif take a moment to consider their writing lives and how writing shapes and draws the wider world’s attention to the complexities of a conflict zone and the lives of those who survive within.